(M) ★★★
Director: James Mangold.
Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Ethann Isidore, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann.
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| It turned out that "spelunking" didn't mean what she thought it meant. |
For a generation of fans of a certain age, the first three Indiana Jones movies set the benchmark for escapist entertainment. They were, and are, the ultimate adventure films thanks to their classic set-pieces, a rampaging score, and one of cinema's most iconic heroes. In many a young mind, they inspired an interest in everything from archaeology and Biblical historicity to stuntwork and whipcracking.
I land firmly within that generation. I've seen Raiders Of The Lost Ark more times than probably any other film. I've read the books and the comics, played The Fate Of Atlantis, cracked a whip, and dressed as Jones for a fancy dress party. I've even seen Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull three times. For me, any Indiana Jones is better than no Indiana Jones.
Setting this high level of bias aside, I can say confidently that the fifth and final outing of Professor Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Ph.D. is solidly good without being great. It fails to reach the lofty heights of the first three films, but nails the tone of the series better than Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. It's authentically Indiana Jones, even though it's lacking in some departments and gets very weird in its final act.
After an opening sequence set during WWII featuring a CGI de-aged Indiana Jones, the film finds a 70-year-old Indy (played by an 80-year-old Ford) preparing for retirement in 1969. But a visit from his god-daughter Helena Shaw (Waller-Bridge) sets him on the trail of the film's MacGuffin - the Dial of Destiny. The powerful yet broken relic not only sent Helena's father Basil Shaw (Jones) mad, but it's also the target of a former Nazi scientist (Mikkelsen), hellbent on using the dial to correct some of Hitler's mistakes.
Re-watching Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull recently, I was struck by how that film's tone was ever-so-slightly off compared with the previous three Indy adventures. It accidentally erred towards goofy instead of charmingly amusing, its wackiness sucking a little too much of the tension out of proceedings. In Dial Of Destiny, the tone is spot on. The humour has a sincerity that avoids Crystal Skull's wink-at-the-audience silliness. Dial Of Destiny keeps its integrity and its sense of danger close to hand amid the silliness.
This means that even when the film ends up in a very strange place in the final third, we can still get a beautifully heartfelt moment and a hearty laugh out of it. It means that amid the seemingly endless car chases, the gags land and we worry this will be one scrape too many for this surprisingly spritely old man.
Age has certainly wearied Indiana Jones, even if Harrison Ford is in absurdly good shape for an octogenarian. That's a factor in Dial Of Destiny in so many ways, some good, some bad. It adds a certain thematic and emotional richness to the film in places - something not seen so prominently in the franchise outside of Last Crusade. Jones sees the world has passed him by in some moments, which is hard to take for him and the audience. He's as much of a relic as the ones he teaches about or recovers from lost temples. But his senior citizen status does bring its own "ooh, there goes a hip" kind of thinking to some of the action scenes.
Somehow it mostly works. The action set pieces - most notably an opening sequence involving a train full of Nazis and an early horse ride through a New York subway - are good, though a few more with iconic ambition would have been better than yet another car chase. Having very punchable Nazis as the baddies is a great move, Mikkelsen avoids chewing the scenery but brings a studied menace to his role, while Waller-Bridge makes a fantastic companion for Jones.
As for Ford, it's one of his better performances, and easily the most well-rounded piece of acting he's delivered in the franchise. He always made Jones a man who could be hit and be hurt, but a desire to do what's right (mixed with bloody-minded stubbornness) always got him back on his feet. In Dial Of Destiny, Jones has been hit and hurt so much he's slightly broken, and he's angry at the world because of it. He's still bloody-mindedly stubborn and driven by a strong moral compass, but he has also kinda given up. And having nothing left to care about makes him dangerous. Somehow, Ford conveys all that - the rage, the fragility, the danger, the emptiness - and makes Indy more interesting than he's ever been.
Overall it's a bit long (I blame the car chases), some of it feels kinda tepid or lazily plotted, and the ending is going to take some getting used to, but it has its heart and its tone and its fedora in the right place. Is it a fitting end to all Indiana Jones movies? Its final moments are subversively perfect in one sense, while in another sense, they can't match the wit of Raiders' conclusion or the grandeur of Last Crusade's.
But like I said, any Indiana Jones is better than no Indiana Jones. And if this is the end, well, thank you, Indiana Jones. It's been a wild ride, and we've loved every minute of it. Even the bit where you dodged a nuclear blast by hiding in a lead-lined fridge.
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